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This US Navy photo shows how members of the Directed Energy and Electric Weapon Systems Program Office, of Naval Sea Systems Command, fire a laser through a beam director (AFP Photo / US NAVY / Handout)
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The US Navy hopes to have operational laser cannons on their ships within the next four years. They will be used against fast-moving targets like cruise missiles, speedboats and drones.

The Navy hopes to have a working prototype for the futuristic laser weapon within two years, Wired reports
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The development comes after the Navy decided laser weapons technology is mature enough for deployment. The tipping point was last April’s test of a 15-kilowatt beam solid state laser, which managed to set afire the target ship’s engine. The target was moving at a distance of almost 2 km from the laser-equipped destroyer.
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It’s not clear how ONR’s proceeding with a relatively low-power laser will affect research of a more powerful megawatt-scale weapon under the Free Electro Laser project. The Navy hopes to develop a more powerful scalable weapon using magnets rather than a crystal as the gain medium. It could be used against heavily-armored vessels as opposed to unarmored aircraft and boats.
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Futuristic laser weapons are not the only ones the US Navy hopes to deploy. In February, ONR announced it had started testing for the first industry prototype of an electromagnetic railgun launcher. The weapon uses powerful magnetic fields to accelerate a conductive projectile to speeds of thousands of meters per second – enough to throw it hundreds of kilometers.

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Last edited by madmacmo; 06-09-2015 at 02:40 AM.
Reason: http://web.archive.org/web/20131010102915/http://laserpointerforums.com/f54/us-navy-may-deploy-laser-cannons-within-just-four

magnets as a gain medium instead of crystals, i havent seen any clear magnets before

right... this technology uses Microwaves to create a stream of electrons. The light is created by bunching the electrons together via N|S|N|S| alternating magnetic polarity.
The bunching results in photons that can be emitted in varying degrees of wavelengths.

"To create a FEL, a beam of electrons is accelerated to almost the speed of light. The beam passes through the FEL oscillator, a periodic transverse magnetic field produced by an arrangement of magnets with alternating poles within a optical cavity along the beam path. This array of magnets is sometimes called an undulator, or a "wiggler", because it forces the electrons in the beam to follow a sinusoidal path. The acceleration of the electrons along this path results in the release of photons (synchrotron radiation). Since the electron motion is in phase with the field of the light already emitted, the fields add together coherently. Whereas conventional undulators would cause the electrons to radiate independently, instabilities in the electron beam resulting from the interactions of the oscillations of electrons in the undulators and the radiation they emit leads to a bunching of the electrons, which continue to radiate in phase with each other.[4] The wavelength of the light emitted can be readily tuned by adjusting the energy of the electron beam or the magnetic field strength of the undulators." quote from FEL project WIKI.